5,945 words
CHAPTER 2
THE LAST GLASS BEAD GAME
Decommissioning The Universities
It is difficult to imagine that there is either the wherewithal or energy within the university to constitute or reconstitute the idea of an educated human being and establish a liberal education again.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
For those malevolent ideologues in the process of destroying education in the West, the universities are like British munitions factories in World War 2. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, strategically bombed what were essentially huge warehouses packed with explosives. When hit, not only were they destroyed, but so was a large part of the surrounding area.
The decline of the Western university as the traditional “seat of learning” is tragically effective due not only to its own destruction, but to the resultant damage in the wider community. The management of governance – and we will not escape the managerial model for some time to come – is downstream from the dreaming spires, in the same way as bankside polluters kill fish further down the river.
A key record of the decline of the American university, and one which can be extrapolated in the usual way and with the usual time lag to Britain and Europe, is Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Universities are vital, Bloom writes, for reasons which, knowing what we now know about the systemic sabotage being effected on these once-venerable communities, were always certain to enrage the post-modernes:
“[A] great university… made a distinction between what is important and what is not important. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition but because tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level.”
Here we see why the classical university kicks the hornets’ nest of a new generation raised on equality and its bastard offspring, equity. Importance/non-importance implies a natural hierarchy of value, anathema to the new Left. Tradition is seen as vital, and tradition is always white and therefore oppressive. Finally, “models of discussion on a higher level” are not inclusive, and inclusivity is the fairy dust the post-modernes wish to sprinkle on the whole kingdom. The white canon is no longer seen as the fons et origo of wisdom, but as occupied territory to be won back or, failing that, subject to scorched-earth policies. And so the university is a key battleground if education in any meaningful sense is to be destroyed.
Any serious person of the Right would now see the university as occupied territory, and one occupied by an enemy to be feared. Not so long ago, the universities were an enemy from a Leftist perspective. Terry Eagleton, one of Britain’s most famous Marxist academics, bemoaned in 2010 via Britain’s Left-wing newspaper The Guardian that we had “witnessed in our own time… the death of universities as centres of critique.” Eagleton’s remedy for this authoritarian co-opting of higher education by the hated Tories is worth quoting in full:
“Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change that simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”
Can you imagine that white men Rembrandt or Rimbaud would be afforded respect on today’s campuses? Eagleton certainly got what he wanted, just not in the way he expected. Quite apart from the fact that all of what Eagleton suggests is firmly in place in the modern university, the proviso being that it is tightly controlled ideologically, and any “critical reflection on human values and principles” is only permissible within strictly policed guidelines, there is the unmistakeable and charred odour of class resentment. Universities were always the loci of intellectual aristocracy, and they were designed that way. The aristocrats still walk the groves of academe, however, and they still expect to go on to join the ruling class. But they are different animals.
Of the university he said: “No, I was never there. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow.”
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Centres of learning had existed long before universities became our familiar if fading institutions. Plato’s Academy, Islamic schools such as Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, and English Cathedral schools were all proto-universities. In Latin, universitas was a general term not specific to organised pedagogical structures, and the universitas scholarium was the forerunner of the university in that it was independent and defined by its academic freedom. Philosophy was present from the outset.
At the very earliest universities of the 12th century – French in northern Europe, Italian in the south – students would study philosophy as a matter of course, an introductory discipline to prepare them for their core studies, usually theology in France, medicine and law in Italy. Aristotle was the core curriculum, and by the 13th century students at Paris or Bologna would familiarize themselves with the Organon (meaning, roughly, the “tool”), the central text which would enable them to construct rational arguments, understand and perfect rules and techniques of clear thinking, follow the laws of demonstration, syllogism, induction and deduction and the rest of the Western intellectual apparatus which would, we might say, reach its completion with the Enlightenment.
It is worth noting that the university at Bologna was run entirely by the student body. They decided on the faculty, they set the curriculum, theirs was the ultimate voice of arbitration. How extraordinary that today everything has stayed the same and yet everything has changed. Today’s Western university – or “uni” as students in Britain call them, the word “university” having become as archaic as “manufactory” – is also effectively run by the student body, and yet the resultant intellectual ethos and atmosphere could hardly be more alien to the unsullied air of enquiry and learning which inspired the independent university collectives of the 12th century.
But let us leave Medieval Europe and rejoin the present. What of today’s descendants of the archetypal Parisian and Bolognese universities? What are they contributing to the life and pursuance of culture? I will look at three case studies, from the last decade. One is a student document from Berkeley University in 2015, one a professional description of a contemporary American philosopher and his area of expertise, and the last the 2021 story of a Professor of Philosophy at my own alma mater, The University of Sussex.
A teacher… is afraid of his students and flatters them, while the students despise their teachers…
Plato, The Republic
For the post-modern, progressive student of the Humanities, occupying mere buildings is somewhat passé, as students already own today’s campuses. That’s not to say that some undergraduate collective has gone about the place buying head leases and freeholds at auction, but rather that students now dictate even the topography of Western universities, with their safe zones, racially segregated events, free-speech gazebos, and various other havens from the micro-aggressions and white privilege which lurk in every seminar and common room. No, occupying the physical infrastructure of a university is yesterday’s news. Students have moved on to the occupation of what they are supposed to be at university to read; the syllabus itself. This stifling of academic free speech began, with supreme irony, at the erstwhile home of the defence of that same precious commodity: Berkeley University.
Occupy the Syllabus is a document produced in 2015 by Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret, then students at UC Berkeley and, in Perret’s case, an intern at something called the Gender Equity Resource Center. This seminal call to academic arms has as its mission statement its second paragraph, reproduced here in full:
“We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity – economically privileged white males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States) – are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. The white male syllabus excludes all knowledge produced outside this standardised canon, silencing the perspectives of the other 99 per cent of humanity.”
The co-authors lament that a course on “classical social theory… did not include a single woman or person of colour.” All people are, of course, people of colour; we would be invisible otherwise. What the authors mean is that the syllabus does not contain any writers of one of the academically approved colours, none were picked for decorative purposes from the colour-swatch of oppression and victimhood. Students are no longer in their ivory tower, but occupy a less phallocentric structure – and preferably in ebony.
The importance of Occupy the Syllabus lies not in its credibility but in what it symptomatises. Students are now increasingly setting the curricular agenda, an agenda that in fact holds no genuine feeling for women, “people of colour”, or any other vogueish victim group, but is predicated on the Leftist, progressivist need to control thought and language. In the same way that measles presents as red spots, progressivist yearning for control presents as the self-hating politics of grievance, identity and victimhood.
Students are able to impose this type of garbled pushiness because they are increasingly realising that what they want to get away with, they can. They resemble criminals in inner-city areas, realising that no matter what outrages they commit, the police are not going to come and stop them. In fact, the police are more likely to prosecute their victims. Thus, American professor Edward Schlosser, in an article published in the same year as the Berkeley manifesto, and entitled I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me, flags up the self-preservation society that American teaching has become:
“I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts… That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad…” (Vox, June 3, 2015)
Occupy the Syllabus is a similar rap sheet of inappropriate texts and oppressive readings. “We were required to read Hegel on the ‘Oriental realm’ and Marx on the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, but not a single author from Asia”, it simpers, as though a text on the Industrial Revolution would somehow be invalid without reading the diary of a rivetter. We note in passing that Karl Marx, an impecunious sponger, would be turning in his Highgate Cemetery grave to read himself described as “economically privileged.”
For Kazuo and Perret, it is not merely racial quotas that are troubling; modish causes célèbres are also shockingly omitted from the teacher’s art:
“The professor even failed to mention the Ferguson events, even though he lectured about prisons, normalising discourse and the carceral archipelago in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the day after the grand jury decision on the murder of Michael Brown.”
And, lest ye scoff, think of the harm this type of “exclusionary education” can do to today’s larval geniuses. Steel yourselves. “Sometimes,” the authors shockingly inform us, “we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lectures.”
Of course, there is an added attraction to ethnic and gender cleansing of the humanities curriculum; it makes it easier. I remember English undergraduates at my alma mater – to which we will return – catching the exotic aroma of philosophy and deciding to try a module or two, before scurrying back to their chosen subject and burrowing into their safe little box of leaves once they realised that a feminist critique of Jane Austen cut into their social lives far less than did 600 pages of Spinoza. Ultimately, today’s “uni” students wish to ban all white devils from their wish-list of gratificatory, lightweight, intellectual beach-reading because the alternative –intellectual endeavour – is too gruelling a prospect, and one to which they instinctively know they would not be equal.
Thus, when the authors of Occupy the Syllabus state their wish to “dismantle the tyranny of the white male syllabus [and] demand the inclusion of women, people of color and LGBTQ authors on our curriculum”, it may not be because they are social justice warriors, but because they find white literature too hard. Far easier to remove the difficulty by importing less demanding reading from the library of a new genre which will tend increasingly to uniformity and repetition. One day, if the progressivists continue their long march, the curricular landscape of the universities will bring to mind Dorothy Parker’s decision to leave the New Yorker because every short story printed seemed to be about someone’s childhood in India.
At the end of a hateful document, however, love is all you need, and the authors of Occupy the Syllabus finish with a challenge:
“[I]f you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity. Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi?”
For, along with the desire to control dissident thought, this is what is at issue. If the syllabus cannot be turned into a “Me Report” for a new, millennial generation of obtuse, ethno-masochistic, narcissistic praise junkies, then it must be consigned to the flames. Students today are cheerfully subverting the whole point of the university – free intellectual enquiry under the tutelage of experts in the relevant field – in favour of bigoted, dogmatic orthodoxies to which the faculty will adhere if they wish to continue working, and their employers will respect if they wish their funding to continue. And if they don’t? Let us turn our attention to the faculty, let’s look at who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
Ecce Homo.
John 19:5/Title of Nietzsche’s autobiography
Much is made of the Athenian agora, and the affection Socrates and his band of citizen-seminarians had for young men, but this is not the focal point for “queer philosophy.” Let us turn to the classically named Arcadia University.
Dr. Ian M. Sullivan is, at the time of writing, an assistant professor of Philosophy at this establishment. His work is exemplary as symptomatic of what has happened to the Humanities. “Through queer philosophy,” we are told, “Dr. Sullivan gains an alternative framework to explore classical philosophical writings.”
Whereas the Humanities merely has a venerable history, the relative infancy of queer philosophy apparently stands in its favour. One paragraph is worth quoting in full as it contains what we might call an “anlage” – the microscopic, blastophemic clump of cells from which a whole creature will eventually grow – of grievance studies in general:
“The history of queer philosophy, and queer studies more broadly, is an ongoing developing field in academia. One of the social norms which queer theory explores is heteronormativity, or the notion that heterosexuality is inherently the default and that homosexuality is unnatural or at least abnormal. In particular, Dr. Sullivan explores queer issues through the intersections of gender and sexuality not on the basis of “gay” versus “straight”, but rather what is considered “normative” or “deviant”, and how these social norms are constructed.”
By nature. Social norms are constructed by nature with all its pantheistic industry. Not even the Gods, Plato tells us, war against necessity. This is, frankly, not philosophy. It is just intellectual palare, campus chatter amongst homosexuals.
But what impulse drives academics to so distort and assail philosophy, a discipline which hasn’t appeared fully formed like some deity – as has, apparently, “queer theory” – but rather been formed by the dripping accretion of centuries of (white) intellectual endeavour? Why can philosophy not be allowed to tell its own tale? Why must it be replaced with pre-fabricated myths plucked from magazine-rack-level thought?
And why is the reaction of those who run modern universities against heretics so immediate and fierce, so Inquisition-like?
Modern universities are producing graduates who lack the experience of uninhibited debate and casual provocation. As a result, our society is effectively unlearning liberty.
Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate
Debate goes back at least to the Athenian square and Socratic discussion, and there we also find Lukianoff’s “casual provocation”, as Socrates often needles his interlocutors. Provocation, an element of goading, is essential to debate. After all, one side is opposing another and thus disagreeing with them and thus provoking a response. The Left cannot accept this – although they won’t know why – because they are essentially childlike in their interpersonal relations, angry because Mummy or Daddy won’t let them get what they tell them they want, what they demand, as a certain type of troubled child will do.
This fear of debate is exemplified by social media comments made by a Labour MP, Nadia Whittome, in 2020. Ms. Whittome faced a “Twitter storm” (which the media now deems newsworthy) when she wrote that “we must not fetishise debate.” Now, while this seems at first glance a candid admission of the Left’s approach to discussion of culture and politics in any form, the phrase actually does – for once – require setting in context.
In a piece for something called Indy Voices, Ms. Whittome had the following to say about issues surrounding transgenderism:
“We must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is in itself an innocuous act… The very act of debate in these cases is an effective rollback of assumed equality and a foot in the door for doubt and hatred.”
In short, anything which is a legacy of the classical world – and philosophy is a jewel of much value in that imperial crown – is now subject to a tabu, a banishing, exile, historical revisionism with a little drop of poison. Note how “doubt”, the vital Cartesian faculty, is implicitly bracketed with “hatred.” Let us see how this new Puritanism affects modern academia, and visit my alma mater, The University of Sussex.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Exodus 22.18
Professor Kathleen Stock taught philosophy at The University of Sussex, and was hounded out in 2021 in a now-familiar fashion after comments concerning “transgenderism” and biological sex in her lectures, interviews, and books.
An activist group of latter-day witchfinders on campus threatened Professor Stock and demanded her resignation. Her union allowed her to burn and even stoked the fire.
Professor Stock, however, did not make the usual pathetic and grovelling – yet professionally required – apology issued for fear of losing tenure and pension, but fought her corner with just as much spirit and erudition as Socrates before the dicasts of the Athenian court in Plato’s Apology. On a related subject, let us look at the case for the prosecution.
An anonymous group of students wrote an open letter to the university, headed ANTI-STOCK ACTION 2021. It is a semi-literate, sociopathic screech which exemplifies today’s student Left in Britain. “Stock is”, it rants, “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes… [whose] rhetoric has contributed to the dire state of unsafety [sic] in this colonial shit-hole”. Note that students benefiting from an education in a university set amid the beautiful English South Downs instead of, say, Nairobi or Caracas, tick the box for oikophobia, the word used for “hatred of home” by the great English philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, and this ethno-masochism explains much in the case of Professor Stock.
For her persecution comes despite the fact that, with her victimhood credentials in place, she seemed safe from the Klieg lights of the woke watchtowers. Yes, she is a lesbian. Yes, she teaches gender studies. Yes, she is happy to use personal pronouns and thinks it disrespectful not to. But she offends on two counts: She spoke heresy, and she is white.
The letter continues, and the bold type is in the original, presumably as these people tend to think in bold type:
“Transphobes like Stock are anti-feminist, anti-queer and anti-intellectual, they are harmful and dangerous to trans people.”
It is a pity for Sussex that Professor Stock was on the faculty and not a student, and that she is “anti-intellectual”, as the university’s team which appeared on the famous inter-collegiate BBC2 quiz show University Challenge lost to Birmingham University just after her dismissal by a score of 10 points to 245. Of the three questions the Sussex team answered correctly, one was identifying a song from a Walt Disney cartoon.
Plato would have recognised Professor Stock as the Ancient Greek pharmakōs, the scapegoat beaten and cast out from the city walls in order to expiate the sins of the citizens. Also, he would have recognised the source of what he called “bastard (or illegitimate) reasoning” of the type that today sees children believing they can elect to be a man or a woman rather being tethered to what biology has dictated. Plato’s comment on philosophy could be dedicated to Professor Stock:
“In any case, the present error, which… explains why philosophy isn”t valued, is that she is taken up by people who are unworthy of her, for illegitimate students shouldn”t be allowed to take her up, but only legitimate ones.”
The legitimacy to study your favoured discipline is no longer sufficient to maintain that study. Times have changed.
And you may ask yourself, well,
How did I get here?
Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime
How did the universities of 11th century Western Europe become the malevolent kindergartens of today? Bloom explains, across the years, why it is that the university has been decommissioned. His model is an exact negative of the modern Western university:
“The successful university is the proof that a society can be devoted to the well-being of all, without stunting human potential or imprisoning the minds to the goals of the regime.”
“Imprisoning the minds to the goals of the regime.” That ought to be a motto beneath the crest of every Western university. To control the universities is, for the globalists, controlling the ideological water supply, free to poison it or divert it as much as they choose. The university has gone from being a haven or sanctuary for thought to being a cross between a Marxist finishing school and an anarchist boot-camp.
Bloom suggests that it was not until the Enlightenment that philosophers became inextricably wedded to the university. This gives them a base for their operations, but it also weakens them, makes them vulnerable to the State. They have been taken out of the white upper classes – a class-war gesture melding with the new “woke” edicts – and rounded up somewhere where they rely on the government’s coffers. They have been sold into indentured tenure.
The generations currently being exposed to anti-Enlightenment thought processes will inevitably lead to a negative print of the Renaissance, an age in which creative thought will be spurned and its practitioners ostracised, excommunicated from the new religion. What is coming next is the Denaissance. It might benefit us to consider the point of learning at a higher, abstract level, and so we will turn to the great quasi-satirical novel about German universities, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
Do you want to play a game?
Catchphrase from the Saw film franchise
The Glass Bead Game is the 1943 novel for which German author Herman Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and is an ascetic bildungsroman set around a mythical province, Castalia, which is the elite of the elite universities. The account is made all the more authentic by Hesse’s claim to be editing the life of an actual historical person, and therefore missing some vital documentation you might expect to be present but including ephemera such as poems and scholarly essays. The title, The Glass Bead Game, refers to an intellectual exercise which is the sole focus of the students within the fictional province of Castalia. (Although I don’t speak German, the original title is prettily evocative; Das Glasperlenspiel.)
The Game itself is the preserve of the Castalians and the masters who mentor them. It is a hyper-intellectual game using symbolism and comparison, which takes its name from a rudimentary version once played using actual glass beads. The author explains:
“A Game, for example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, of from the actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else enrich its expressiveness by allusion to kindred concepts.”
The novel follows Joseph Knecht (whose surname means “serf”) on his passage from the elite schools to the most prestigious Castalian college, and ultimately all the way to the role of magister ludi, the Master of the Glass Bead Game. Knecht has many worldly temptations on his intellectual odyssey. He has a friend who chooses the provincial life, the real world, rather than the cerebral confines of Castalia. Knecht loses interest in him, but his interest in the world outside Castalian walls has been piqued, and his travels outside Castalia threaten his relationship with the Game and its order. (A similar tension exists in Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund). Hesse has written an esoteric, affectionate novel, but it is also one which casts many questions we may want to listen to concerning the role of the university.
Castalia is the result of social engineering of a sort – Knecht is reminded by an elder that the Game is paid for by the state – but represents the distillation of intellectuality rather than what we currently see, which is more a type of sedimentation whereby the truly creatively intelligent are forced to the bottom of the system in favour of diverse ideological fodder, worthless to the university and unable (on the non-STEM side) to think anything through in post-Enlightenment style, but instead there simply to be indoctrinated with neo-Marxist, flat-packed mottoes sugar-coated with the warm glow that comes with fighting social justice. Many universities now prioritise “social justice” over intellectual endeavour in their mission statements.
There is no simple parallel to be drawn between the modern university and Hesse’s Castalia. The players of the Glass Bead Game are expressly disbarred from professional pursuits outside the city walls, also pledging “to abstain from government and competition and instead to assure stability for the spiritual foundations of moderation and laws everywhere”. The Castalians are not being groomed as Plato’s philosopher-kings, but more as a metapolitical regulatory body. There is no such disconnect between British universities and the political class, and it would be quicker to compile a list of influential UK politicians of the past thirty years who did not read PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at either Oxford or Cambridge than those who did.
The Glass Bead Game is about intellectual pursuit, but in a wholly dispassionate way. It is not practical philosophy. As Knecht’s mentor says:
“Philosophizing should be done only with legitimate tools, those of philosophy. Our game is neither philosophy nor religion; it is a discipline of its own, in character most akin to art. It is an art sui generis.”
The Game itself, however, does not arise sui generis, and Hesse sketches a cultural history of how Western civilization sees Castalian elitist intellectuality partly as redemptive, partly as an exotic item of expenditure for a state which seems to receive nothing back from the game-players of Castalia.
During this history lesson, the Glass Bead Game is shown in part as a reaction to the “Age of the Feuilleton”, or a time of light, engaging literature with no intellectual sustenance, and a sardonic foreshadowing of our own times:
“Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on.”
In 1943, when the book was written, Hesse already understood why it is today that Leonardo DeCaprio addresses climate conferences and not Bjørn Lomborg.
The history continues in Spenglerian fashion, with the age of frippery becoming darker, as:
“They had just fully realized (a discovery that had been in the air, here and there, from the time of Nietzsche on) that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in.”
And so after the collapse of one phase of civilization, a new one begins, and “there arose the Glass Bead Game.”
[The purpose of great and religious art] is to lift us up above life and show it as itself a game of play: a game that, take it ne’er so terrible and earnest an appearance, yet is here again shown to us as a mere… picture, so that in this way it comforts us and wafts us from the common truth of our distress.
Richard Wagner, Essay on Beethoven
The Game itself is a curious amalgam of the classical humanities and the rigidly mathematical, using for its guiding principles mathematics itself and the discipline around which much of The Glass Bead Game revolves; music. Again, Hesse has something to say to our contemporary times, stating that “the more tempestuous the music, the more doleful the people.” And Hesse would only have been thinking of Shostakovich, and could never have dreamt of what passes for music now.
There is a constant backdrop of threat to the very existence of Castalia. “Historically we are… ripe for dismantling”, laments a Castalian elder. Our age, however, has been somewhat more slippery. Instead of getting rid of the universities per se, the globalists have just exercised another of their catch-phrases, one used in connection with Covid-19 and its origins: “Gain of function.”
The university was based on an ideal of truth and the search for truth. Now campus is where truth goes to die. The ivory towers of academia are now just an outmoded Potemkin village. (The term “ivory tower” is a delightful amalgam of Sainte Beuve, a replica of Magdalen College, Cambridge, and the Song of Solomon. That is exactly the type of cross-pollination of meaning that would have delighted Hesse’s fictional Castalian game-players.)
A theme of the book is the worth of purely intellectual pursuit to the society that surrounds it and, as is stated, pays for it. But although The Glass Bead Game reads for all the world as a critique of the relative uselessness of universities, at least in terms of the Humanities, ivory towers as they are set in the groves of academe, it is also a critique of technocracy and the levelling of the collective intellect. As Father Jacob says to the young Joseph Knecht:
“Come now, of theology we will not speak. You are much too far from that. You could at least do with a few simple foundations, with a science of man, for example, a real doctrine and real knowledge about the human race. You do not know man, do not understand him in his bestiality and as the image of God. All you know is the Castalian, a special produce, a caste, a rare meeting experiment in breeding.”
This, of course, is the end and ethos of the modern university, to produce “students” who have never really studied, thinkers who have no conception of how to think, merely what to think, and ideologically conformist, anti-intellectual replicants. In effect, what emerges from the non-STEM collegiate body is human software which will soon be virally introduced into society and government employment, where it will become malware.
Where the Castalian gains entry to Castalia and the Glass Bead Game by virtue of academic excellence, the route to the glittering prizes requires a different type of paperwork nowadays. Scotland’s University of St. Andrew’s may not be familiar as a name, but it has recently been in the news for two reasons. Firstly, it has topped the league of British universities, above even the Oxbridge colleges for the first time. Secondly, students must now complete a short examination before they are allowed to enrol. This takes the form of some Castalian inquisition for which only the smartest in the land need apply, surely.
Not so, and this is not confined to St Andrew’s. Students must now complete introductory, pre-degree modules on diversity, consent, and climate change. Failure either to take the short examinations, or to provide pre-approved answers, renders the student ineligible to take their degree. The paper on diversity requires admission of “personal guilt” and “unconscious bias” and you can bet that the only people required to take that module will be roughly the same colour as were William of Ockham and A. J. Ayer.
So, now the intellect is not enough to reach Olympus. Conformism is also required. And then, once the student has abased himself (because this is all aimed at men) before the new gods, he may find that the pursuit of truth is harder than he thought. Truth used to be the first casualty of war. Now, it is academia’s snipers that gun her down.
John R. Searle, in a 1993 paper entitled Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake?, notes that there are serious and deleterious changes being made in universities:
“…not just to the content of the curriculum but to the very conception of rationality, truth, objectivity, and reality that have been taken for granted in higher education, as they may have been taken for granted in our civilization at large.”
Taking Shakespeare off the curriculum is foolish and petulant but ultimately meaningless as the devoted student with anything of worth to offer will seek out Shakespeare for himself. But once you start removing the foundation stones of post-Enlightenment thought and reason – the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, the law of excluded middle, the difference between subjectivity and objectivity, the necessary superiority of ratio over emotio among them – then truth is in freefall and epistemology becomes a yard sale of random ideas randomly priced.
There may be questions asked concerning the worth of Castalia in Hesse’s novel, but what is not in doubt is that the students are the best the country has to offer, and the exercise and influence of the pure intellect is needed just as much as the practical, or we end up with the carnival we are now living in. Perhaps, when and if philosophy emerges from the exile she is currently entering, she will return as something like Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.
What happens in Castalia stays in Castalia. A certain breed of human being is produced, and this is precisely what is happening now in modern universities but, mutatis mutandis, the engineered breed of new Castalians is faulty, genetically weak, intellectually negligible, and that is the idea. The modern British and American university (and doubtless others in the West and Commonwealth) is intended solely to produce identikit, bureaucratic, quasi-autistic citizens who have – and have to have – the affidavit of their degree in order to gain employment, and an inability to use thought to investigate the world and to grade it into wisdom and folly.
With the modern Western university, these “students” (who have studied nothing of worth) will soon be – are already – out in society, running things, organizing the remnants of civilization along totalitarian, anti-rational lines, closing down language, thought and free enquiry as a priority. Unlike Hesse’s fictional student enclave, whose austere players of the Glass Bead Game are not permitted to enter public life, today’s students won’t be equipped to do anything else. These are the agents of decline. We have had our Renaissance, and now it is time to meet its evil twin.